Game Devs Struggle with Perfectionism & Workflow

“I have ADHD myself and have been trying to make a game as a solo dev for around 3–5 months, but my progress has been really slow. I get bored and distracted easily, especially when I get stuck. I’ll start doing anything that gives me more dopamine, modeling, animation, VFXor even something completely unrelated to the game. Sometimes I won’t feel like doing anything for several days. Then suddenly I’ll get the motivation back and work on the game with full passion only to get stuck again. I’ll si”

“I'm developing my own game, and lately I've realized that one of my biggest problems is that I genuinely don't know when to stop working on it. I'm extremely perfectionistic about basically every part of the project. If I'm working on the game itself, there's always something I want to improve. A piece of lighting that could look slightly better, an environment that could use more detail, a mechanic that could feel smoother, a sound that could be replaced... there's a”

“Hello! Hope everyone is having a good day. I’m here to hear if anyone has gone through something similar. I feel like my perfeccionism and fear of failure are like chains to me. I’m a game designer with big dreams and ideas. However, when I sit down to learn, my head often feels overwhelmed and confused. Not because the content o f what I learn is difficult, but because I have difficulty to feel that I improved or learned anything and retained information. And even more difficult to apply what I”

“I have this annoying habit of trying to make things perfect from start, I can't just place a placeholder or a ruff thing of something. How do you people just make your self calm down and just build prototypes and not create like game playing standard from start? how can I tell my self I don't need perfect to make things work, before you.. make it perfect? submitted by /u/TrainingSecure4028 [link] [comments]”

“I’m sure I’m not the only one facing this problem, but I’d still like some professional advice—or just some advice in general. Over the past year, I’ve noticed that my struggles with game development aren't due to a lack of knowledge or technical skills, but rather a lack of motivation—specifically, the drive to simply push a game to even the prototype stage. Yet, mentally, I constantly feel the urge to take a game all the way to a finished state. Right now, I have several projects I keep ju”

“I'm sure this is a fairly typical situation for a lot of game devs, but I find myself not working on my game for weeks, if not months. On days where I come home from my day job, I think "I can't work on my game, I'm too tired and I need to relax." So I don't work on my game. On days where I don't work, I feel like I should be doing a billion more things like washing dishes, cleaning up my apartment, cooking or just enjoying my day off. So I don't work on my game”

“Disclaimer: I am French so the post might contain bad english. I always wanted to get in gamedev but everytime i am starting a project i quickly lose motivation because there i realise that there is alot of things i can't do (level design, doing good scripts etc...) and i never know where and how i can learn thoses, also everything i am making look horrible to my eyes for some reasons and i can't get rid of that feeling. It's like that for every single project i am making, gamedev or”

“Given the slightest opportunity, gamedev chews us up and spits us out. This is a truism at all levels: 9-5er to passion-chaser, industry to hobby, solo to team, AAA to indie. The combination of urgency, technical skill, artistry, ambiguity, and complexity demanded by every part of gamedev all push us to work until burnout and then blame ourselves for doing it. This is only increased if you happen to be neurodivergent or a minority. I like to write as a hobby, and my day job is bartending. Both o”

“So i am (if I say myself) a pretty creative person, and i wanna get into game dev, im too young now, but its my dream job. I have tried numerous times to try and make a project, but every single time, I get stuck with coding, I feel exhausted from doing it for very long, or I wanna do something else after a few hours. I then stop, and ill maybe work on it a few more times, but i eventually stop. I dont feel motivated anymore or something else takes up my time, and the next time I am motivated, I”

“Now, this isn’t me complaining that game developers don’t work fast enough. Developers already deal with intense deadlines and pressure, and they work incredibly hard to create these games. This is more from a consumer perspective. It sometimes feels like the long development cycles have affected my excitement and relationship with games. When I know that a sequel to a game I love might be half a decade or more away, it can be difficult to maintain that same level of hype and anticipation. I did”

“Just curious for those that got hired at big studios, how complicated were your portfolio games before you started getting noticed and interviewed? Any area of focus that was particularly important? submitted by /u/Total_Pie_3692 [link] [comments]”

“I am a hard perfectionist, and I don’t mean it in the “tell us your biggest weakness” type of perfectionism, I mean it in the way that makes you despise everything you create that isn’t a masterpiece. If I fail to make what I want perfectly, I attack my own self image, pretty harshly too, not because I want to, it’s just how I was raised I suppose. Im deathly terrified of failure of all sorts and it leads me to be scared to do the first steps on many things. Currently that thing is game dev. I a”

“Alright, this questions is pretty vague so let’s outline a few things first. This is a general and curious question of mine, as a composer. I understand there’s no real concrete answers here. Also, I’m looking for what you think, one, but also for your anecdotal experience as a dev, as in, how many freelance composers have you commissioned before, and over the course of how many years? I understand games might take a long time to develop. Back to the main question, how many games, which use/hire”

“My game has a 'fog of depression' that you can push back by spending memory shards. Depression is a core element in my game, and I want to design more elements around this theme, so it needs to be distinct and clear. I fear that the dark violet version 2 with eyes might make it harder to incorporate other elements with a clear depression theme. However, the color of depression feels more natural on the blue side than on the red side of the spectrum. I also want it to contrast with the &#”

“Until now I've had .h and .cpp files used for hardcoding the data needed for UI element positions and storing/getting textures. This is very hard and obnoxious to scale, and I've learned that hardcoding texture objects is very bad for storage. Whats a better approach then? My game uses SFML and nlohmann json and is relatively simple, if that information helps. submitted by /u/Additional_Court_421 [link] [comments]”

“I'm working on a a space strategy game, it has a typical strategy stuff.. build, research fleet movement, production etc etc and I'm trying to create a tutorial. My original idea was to give tutorial missions with rewards, like build a mine, but that was not enough. I've added bright blinking lights that grabs the attention and guides the user where to click I'm at a point where I needed to add description panels which explains the users by text what they are seeing. But this is”

“I’m implementing an in-game feedback flow for a browser-based strategy game: the player clicks a small camera button, captures the current screen, writes a comment, and sends both as a report. The goal is to avoid vague feedback such as “the UI is confusing” by preserving the exact game state and screen context where the friction happened. For those who have implemented or used similar playtest-feedback systems: - What metadata has been most useful alongside the screenshot (game state, current a”